There are probably many discoveries thought to be more modern, that were actually made earlier than we realise but were never written down. Word of mouth stories are often lost during mass population upheavals like war and famine.
A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas
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Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas
#12Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas
#13The Grand Banks fisheries were known to Basque fishermen even before John Cabot's voyages, so it's not completely surprising that Markland shows up outside the sagas.
Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas
#14There are probably many discoveries thought to be more modern, that were actually made earlier than we realise but were never written down. Word of mouth stories are often lost during mass population upheavals like war and famine.
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Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas
#15And even if they were written down, the Catholic church sure did love to burn books back then!
Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas
#16link without paywall https://web.archive.org/web/20210924231520/https://www.econo...
paywall shows up there too for me
Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas
#17There are probably many discoveries thought to be more modern, that were actually made earlier than we realise but were never written down. Word of mouth stories are often lost during mass population upheavals like war and famine.
And pandemics?
Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas
#18And even if they were written down, the Catholic church sure did love to burn books back then!
Quite the opposite: you have copyist monks to thank for the survival of the vast majority of written material that remains from pre-christian antiquity.
Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas
#19> But it could help explain why Columbus, a Genoese, was prepared to set off across what most contemporaries considered a landless void.
I had always thought that Columbus made the trip because he miscalculated the distance around the globe, while everyone else was saying they'd starve before reaching Asia. He was just lucky enough there happened to be land halfway there, and then mistakenly assumed he made it, since the Caribbean was where he wrongly thought Asia was going to be.
Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas
#20How likely is this to be real? If real, was this work originally widely read in its time?
Quite aside from the difficulty of obtaining copies -- copying texts was an arduous process -- the vast majority of the population of Europe was illiterate so nothing was widely read at the time.